We’re off to Florida for vacation, and then we’re going to the mountains for more vacation and to ring in the new year. Happy Holidays, everyone!
Have a happy and safe Alvistime! May your revenge always be bitter like whiskey!
I’m going to use this opportunity to promote a tool I’ve been using for the last few months that has really helped organize my day-to-day life.
My Lifestyle at the Moment
I don’t lead a particularly hectic life. I don’t own a business or make high-profile decisions, and my days aren’t filled with meetings and phone calls. I go to work, configure software and code, attend a few status meetings here and there, and go home. I have no doubt that I will have the opportunity to have more going on in my professional life in the future, but for now, this is it.
As a result, I have no need to carry a laptop or PDA. I keep my work schedule in Lotus Notes on my work PC, but this is generally limited to current tasks, sporadic meetings, and reminders to fill out my time card. Nothing earthshattering, and certainly nothing to necessitate getting a crackberry or syncing my life to a smart phone of some kind.
As a result, since my social engagements are not overwhelming, and my travel is limited to a few trips a year, I can easily remember most of my schedule in my head. It would, in fact, be a waste of resources for me to carry a device around 24/7, just to remind myself that I’m going to trivia on Wednesday, and driving to Florida for Christmas. I can remember those things on my own.
The Problem
What to do, then, when there’s something I desperately do need to keep up with? (…up with which I need to keep?) I don’t have a laptop or PDA on me, and my washing machine practically dares me to go to a pen- and paper-based system of organization. Keeping notes and important appointments on a PC is a problem of dichotomy: I’m equally likely to be at home as I am to be at work when I need to access some piece of information, be it a flight schedule, a to-do list, or any of the random bits of data we all rely on.
Webmail has solved the work/home email problem, and Gmail picked up the trail blazed by Hotmail (mostly “blazed” pre-Microsoft/Passport/MSN) and improved upon it in all directions. I can send/receive my garrettvonk.com email, through the Gmail interface, at work, at home, or anywhere. And Gmail was my first solution to this “random pieces of data” problem. Much of the data we need to access lives in email messages anyway. Flight itineraries, purchase confirmations and shipping tracking, and invitations to parties all come straight to my email anyway, and with the advent of Gmail, the whole portion of our life that exists in email is now searchable.
But what if I have an idea or conversation outside of the email universe? In the past, I’d create a new email in Gmail and save it as a draft. My drafts would serve as temporary scratchpads, easy to create and find but not organized in any meaningful way. I soon had 25+ email drafts that sorely needed organization and weeding.
Backpack It
I found Backpack in June and started the free trial. I think it took me about 20 minutes to hit the 5-page limit and upgrade my account. I’ll bet a lot of people get converted to paying customers that way. Here are just a few Backpack pages I’ve used lately:
I obviously could have created pages like this in html for free, but I never would have actually taken the time to do so. Backpack lets you create pages like this on a whim, and that’s the part that makes it a killer app. Let’s say Heather and I are throwing a party and we need to brainstorm dishes, decor, liquor brands, and so on. In about 15 seconds, I can create a new page, start some checklists, and share it with Heather’s account privately. She then gets an email saying “new page shared with you” and goes to her Backpack, suggests a great chicken quesadilla recipe, and lo and behold, we’re collaborating!
Like Gmail, Backpack uses AJAX to keep the application very nimble. You can organize your random bits of information into meaningful pages, and just the process of dividing your clutter up into logical units helps immensely. You can set up reminders to go to your email or send your phone an SMS at a pre-set time (I generally use these to remind me “Get the dry cleaning” or “Time for an oil change”).
Anyway, I definitely suggest you at least sign up for a free account to test it out. If you’re on a work computer all day and need to keep track of your life, it sure beats scraps of paper!
Besides experimenting with threaded comments (I know it’s clunky; I’m working on it), a dhtml Flickr badge on my homepage, and a dynamic blogroll in my sidebar, I recently added a simple chunk of PHP that will automatically close comments on any post older than X days. I’m experimenting with a 14-day limit. This should be a good balance of time to where all the discussion can play out, but once the posts really get fully indexed in Google, the spam-bots can’t get to them.
I’m torn over whether this is even necessary, since I’ve never had a single spam message hit my comments. See, I require that everyone’s “first” comment ever be approved by me before it hits the main page. When I approve it, you get a cookie that lets you post all you want without me screening anything. So any comment spam that I get just ends up in this moderation queue anyway. But some days I get 10+ spam comments in the queue, and it’s a little annoying. So, I’m closing commenting on old posts. Rarely do I ever get a comment on anything older than a week or so, so this would seem to be a good idea. And if anyone wants me to re-open comments for a particular post, just say the word and I’ll do it.
Edit: Actually, I forgot that I had already installed hashcash. This should be enough. I guess I do want to encourage comments, even on old posts, so closing all of them might have been a bad idea…
So, we had to run out to California for my grandma’s funeral this past week. I didn’ t even mention my grandpa’s passing earlier this year, and I won’t say much about this one, because such things are very private to me. It was really good to see my family, though.
We were only gone for four days, yet Heather and I agree that it feels like we were gone for an eternity. Tasks piled up at work, another member of my team quit, and there’s much to do before I leave again for Christmas. Do I dare even offer a glance over at my Bloglines feeds? Oh crap, 2554 unread postings. Good thing I didn’t check before lunch!
Let me start by saying this–I hate Bellsouth. I’ve never been so angry with a corporation as I’ve been at Bellsouth dozens of times over the years. I can’t think of a situation that proves a company as inept as the time that Bellsouth charged us for two separate DSL services, in one house that had one phone line. Between their glacial response time and the Indian call center reps who clearly hadn’t learned enough English to actually communicate with me–let alone help me– there isn’t much about Bellsouth that doesn’t frustrate me. Then, relief. We finally lived and worked in an area with five bars, and could ditch Bellsouth. I don’t think I’ve ever had a phone call as satisfying as the one where I called Bellsouth to cancel our phone service and DSL subscription. They saw that I had been a customer for several years and pulled out the stops. I politely listened to their offers of greatly discounted service and I suggested a few places where they could shove said offers. Years of bad service, incompetent CSRs, and predatory pricing had made me bitter and spiteful, and this was my only opportunity to really vote with my wallet, so made sure that the poor “retention specialist” felt my wrath. Yes, I’ll burn my bridges with a business that has acted unfavorably; I don’t care what they think of me.
Lest you confuse this space for some kind of Clark Howard-ian discussion of consumer gripes, I’ll get to my point, which is that…
Hours after New Orleans officials announced Tuesday that they would deploy a city-owned, wireless Internet network in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, regional phone giant BellSouth Corp. withdrew an offer to donate one of its damaged buildings that would have housed new police headquarters, city officials said yesterday.
According to the officials, the head of BellSouth’s Louisiana operations, Bill Oliver, angrily rescinded the offer of the building in a conversation with New Orleans homeland security director Terry Ebbert, who oversees the roughly 1,650-member police force.
City officials said BellSouth was upset about the plan to bring high-speed Internet access for free to homes and businesses to help stimulate resettlement and relocation to the devastated city. Around the country, large telephone companies have aggressively lobbied against localities launching their own Internet networks, arguing that they amount to taxpayer-funded competition. Some states have laws prohibiting them.
If your employer asked you to chip in, say, a third of your paycheck to build a robot that would completely replace you, with the knowledge that they wouldn’t need you anymore once the robot was complete, would you do it? What if your employer forced you to do it?
Nearly every business contributes to the communities in which it does business in the form of state and local taxes. For a giant such as Bellsouth, these taxes, in the form of income tax, payroll taxes, and others, must be enormous. For the local government to go and use that money to build a service that supplants one of Bellsouth’s most lucrative offerings is ridiculous and immoral. Bellsouth has the right to charge whatever crazy price they want for their services, and for the record, I think their pricing structures for both their internet offerings and their POTS services are crazy. But this annoying practice will change with increased competition from Cable Modem service and FTTH on the ISP side, and Vonage and cell phones on the POTS side. Even if it doesn’t, look at me– I am not a Bellsouth customer anymore, by choice. That’s how it should work.
So, we come back to the issue of the offer of the donated building, which Bellsouth has now rescinded. The indignant outrage that some are expressing over Bellsouth’s withdrawal is understandable. Corporate giving, they cry, should not be contingent on the recipient behaving in a manner pleasing to its benefactors. But such corporate giving is voluntary, and Bellsouth would have been foolish to not rescind it, virtually consenting to NOLA’s decision to use their own tax dollars to crowd them out of the market.
Here in Chapel Hill, NC fear of angering local businesses and large corporations is preventing a municipal network from being created by the Town. See how Bell South treats suffering New Orleans? Remember what Verizon did to Philadelphia? Imagine what big bad business will do to Chapel Hill if we dare give something to those in need!
- Angry BellSouth and Anti-Public Good Chapel Hill Business
“Helping those in need” is quite a different proposition from using your own tax dollars to put you out of business. The author of this piece likely wouldn’t cry a single tear for the people who would lose their jobs if nobody had to pay for internet service in this market. People who think this way value the needs of the underprivileged, but don’t seem to give a damn about the people who’ve worked to build a business. It reminds me of a discussion I had about mandating that power companies heat the homes of people who can’t pay. There are people on both ends–people with jobs at Bellsouth or Verizon or whoever, people investing in these companies, etc. and it’s as if you can just ignore these people because you think we should wield the government as a handout tool to give people what they want for free.
Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes
This article makes several fantastic points. One I had forgotten: Bellsouth and the other carriers built their infrastructure, and indeed their legacy, in a highly regulated, anti-market market. That’s why it’s such a beautiful thing to see Vonage, Skype, and the like rush into the market, swords drawn, and declare war on the dinosaurs. And on the broadband carrier side, as the article points out, we have Google. (If you haven’t read about the efforts the Big G is making in the nationwide wireless space, read all about it. )
In other words, these solutions are the panacea to any problems I might have with Bellsouth, and if they are successful enough, might make us forget that Bellsouth’s success was built on government regulation in the first place. But these alternatives will only thrive in an environment where they can compete. If the local government all of the sudden hands out internet access to everyone, free of charge, we’re back where we started– with a government-built monopoly that obviates any need for market competition.
I want everyone to join me in praying that somewhere, somehow, our greatest scientists will develop a cure for sexsomnia.
Reminds me of something…
Leela: “You know Zapp, someone ought to teach you a lesson.”
Zapp: “If it’s a lesson in love, watch out! I suffer from a very sexy learning disability. What do I call it, Kif?”
Kif: *sigh* “Sexlexia.”
- Futurama
